In the spring of 2012, I learned that Norman Rush’s new novel — “Subtle Bodies,” 10 years in the making and out this month — was finally nearly finished. This was news. He and I had been having conversations toward a profile for the magazine (the result of which appears in this past weekend’s issue) since 2010, an unusually long gestation period for an article.

The process by which Rush produces a novel is news, too, as the manuscript — a page from Rush’s third typed draft— reproduced here suggests. Rush composes his manuscripts on oversized sheets of paper that he will sometimes cut and tape and clip together as he builds the book. He writes on several old typewriters. This page was produced on a Royal from the 1930s, a model that features an uncommonly wide 22-inch carriage. Rush thinks it was originally used for putting legends on blueprints. The paper he uses is newsprint stock, 18-by-24 inches, and the typeface is the smallest you can find for a typewriter of the era, “Elite,” allowing the most text to be placed on the large pages. Rush concedes the eccentricity of this method, but it’s not without a purpose.

“You can sometimes get an entire scene onto one of these pages,” Rush told me this week by telephone from his home in Rockland County. “You can get a sense of the emotional feeling of one scene without turning four pages.”

When trying to see a scene whole, Rush isn’t thinking only of himself, as the marks on the typescript here make clear. All of them belong to his wife, Elsa, whom Rush describes as “a partner in the process.” When Rush finishes a draft of a novel, he told me, “I sit next to Elsa and read it aloud.” Then they talk about it.

This page from “Subtle Bodies” is from a fairly early point in the book. Ned, one of the novel’s two protagonists, has gathered with a group of old friends at the Catskills home of his friend Douglas, who died suddenly and in mysterious circumstances. Once there, Ned and his friends begin to learn that other interests are being served by the reunion.

On the bottom right of the page, Elsa has written in red: “WHAT? This is insane.” I asked Rush what was going on there. “It was a recognition by Elsa of a temptation of mine,” Rush said, “to do something too expository too soon,” in this case to explain what Ned was thinking (“He was forgetting the war”) “rather than let the facts develop out of further action. It was giving too much of the main thing prematurely, just too much exposition of his obsession at this point. It needed to come out in an evidentiary way.” I asked Rush if Elsa’s use of the word “insane” bothered him. “It was slightly hyperbolic,” he said, “but it made the point.”
“A mutual adaptation” is how Rush describes the way in which he and Elsa negotiate these edits, a process that entails hours upon hours of conversation. Once I understood this, I asked if I could listen in while they prepared the final draft of “Subtle Bodies” for submission to his publisher. Rush’s final drafts are composed much as the earlier drafts are, with Rush reading and the two of them discussing, but rather than Rush typing up another version, Elsa types the final version into the word processor. Would they, I wondered, tolerate my presence for a half-hour? The answer was a very friendly “no,” as it should have been. I can imagine few spaces more intimate than the pocket Rush and Elsa occupy when conversing about Rush’s art. And Rush is very clear on what that space feels like.

“It’s the greatest pleasure,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. The more substantive conflicts have been worked out in previous readings of the manuscript. We know when we sit down to produce this final version that we’ll basically be O.K. No great wrenches of disagreement. It’s pure fun.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…